Spaghetti Carbonara with prawns and coffee

"Italians have only two things on their minds: the other is spaghetti."

– Catherine Deneuve

Pasta is my weakness, my comfort food, my consolation. I like it all, but I have a preference for the dry one. Spaghetti rather than tagliatelle, reginette rather than pappardelle. I like al dente, as they eat it in the South: with that inner thread that has remained white, with a hard heart, which strains the teeth for a millisecond before yielding. I always like it: when I find good ones, I eat a forkful pulled out of the steaming pot, very naked. 

The recipe, you see, is pretty simple but really nice. I allow myself only small technical variations on the execution more than anything else to adapt it to my taste. Away with the foil, first of all, and then coffee beans pounded in a mortar for marinating the shrimps, instead of leaving them whole. It seems to me that the toasted and warm taste of coffee is perceived more and better married with the creaminess of the egg and the sweetness of the shrimp. The world is full of ways and ways to gorge yourself on spaghetti, after all.

Ingredients

200 g Spaghetti

40 g Low-fat yogurt

1 mandarin (juice)

1Egg Yolk

10 Red prawns

50 g bacon

Coffee beans to taste 

Extra virgin olive oil

salt

Pepper

Guidelines

Shell the shrimp and marinate for an hour in the oil scented with bacon - cut into cubes, but raw - and a few coffee beans (3-4) pounded in a mortar. Prepare in a bain-marie, in a saucepan, a cream with yogurt, egg yolk and tangerine juice. Hall with a pinch of smoked salt. Put the cream in a deep pan, which can comfortably contain spaghetti. After the marinade time, drain the bacon cubes well and put them to brown in a pan, without any kind of oil or butter, over very low heat, almost candlelight. Put a pot of water for the spaghetti on the fire. Salt it when it comes to a boil, throw the spaghetti and cook them for the time indicated on the package. When the spaghetti are at 3/4 of the cooking time, drain them immediately (to give you an example: if on the package it is written that they cook in 9 minutes, remove them at 7 minutes) and pour them into the pan that contains the cream, which in the meantime you have heated up: sauté everything for 3 minutes. While the spaghetti are cooking, turn up the heat under the bacon cubes (which will have become crispy outside, but soft inside) and add the shrimps, marinade oil and a few more coffee beans, this time whole. Sauté over high heat for a couple of minutes. Add bacon, shrimp and coffee to spaghetti, mix for a minute at most and serve the hot pasta.